A bizarre riverbank in fog and snow. Bits of steel and concrete are strewn all around. The skeleton of a skyscraper. Unfinished motorway bridges in a flat landscape. The giant figure of a metal horse. And a statue of Lenin whose outstretched right arm points into nothingness. A cold, ossified no man's land where the washed-up past meets an imagined future. People drift aimlessly through this surreal world. Old certainties no longer count, friends and relatives have disappeared, ideals have been blown away by the wind. Returning home from abroad, Sasha – whose dead father used to own this building site – now has to deal with his legacy: a Kyrgyz worker who is searching his colleagues; an architect with glowing red skin on his forehead; a tour-guide who once stood next to Yeltsin at the barricades in Moscow. Some of them have unexplained nosebleeds. A young student asks: "Who are we? Who am I? Everything is in chaos."
In seven episodes Alexey German Jr. condenses the spiritual state of his country into a symbolic film of long sequences, a fluidly choreographed dance of people and the camera.

It was important for us to try to use the entanglement of human stories as an instrument to grasp the general sense of our country. The country that is so incredibly diverse, and filled with contradictions and sometimes incompatible mentalities. Essentially, we have attempted to return to the traditions of the large Russian classical novel, with its complex approach to real life in different combinations thereof. This is why each of the chapters represents a new, different point of view. Just like during a soccer match you have to keep changing the viewing angles in order to see the most important thing, i.e. the game itself.

Another aspect that is just as important is that for us, the art of cinematography has always gone hand in hand with depiction and painting traditions, and our film is an attempt to speak in a language that springs from the traditions of impressionism. It is bending the reality, not copying it. It does not mean escaping the truth or creating a conceptual space; on the contrary, bending the reality offers the possibility of speaking more profoundly about the world in its vast variety, undertones, and complex combinations. As for connotations with reality, some characters have their prototypes, but not with regard to exact coincidence of specific fates, but with regard to general human nature and certain similarity of circumstances.

In addition, finally, despite the fact that the action of our film takes place in the near future, we did not perceive it as sci-fi. Our task was not to chase time, but to outrun it. Then stop. And wait for time to approach.